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Yes, it’s true. Christians often accuse us of picking on them and ignoring what they consider the more dangerous religions like Islam. (PZ Myers’ readers coined the term “Fatwa envy” to describe such complaints.)

The mundane truth, however, is that we don’t often talk about Islam simply because we rarely get feedback from Muslims.

With a few exceptions. Naturally, in the interest of being equal opportunity offenders (sorry — moral equivalence fallacy anyone?) I must showcase this letter… which, in fairness, makes about the same bad fallacies as any Christian apologist.

Subject: I want a feedback on these possible suggestions that creationism exists.

Hello my name is Muhammad *****-*****

I would like a feedback on these suggestions.

1. Energy exists as a result of different dimensions interacting with each other and among those dimensions is time itself. These dimensions interacting with each other = God. Without these dimensions interacting with each other, energy never would have existed. Now I know in your mind you are asking how do you know that these dimensions = God. Well its the fact that things must come out of things. The only way for something to happen if there is another thing acting on it to make it happen. The fact that energy always existed and never was created or destroyed is confusing because this so called energy that always existed could have just sat its ass up there without cause (being sarcastic) the fact that it didnt just sit its ass out there and that it eventually shat out the universe means there was a particular point in its existence some specific point in its existence that shat out the universe. The fact that it shat out the universe in point A and not in point B means there was some sort of intelligence involved. The only possibility is god therefore by deduction god exists. You cant give me another explanation to explain why point A is where it shat out the universe and not point B without including something intelligent. You cant say well it randomly occured at point A because the fact that it was random means means I would have to go back to my original statement that it could have just sat its ass out there and nothing happened but it didnt, something happened, meaning there has to be something that caused it to happen.

You can say the same and tell me well how did god exist in the first place who created god. No matter how many blocks you build you will still have blocks. No matter how many times you say supernatural created supernatural created supernatural created supernatural, THERE IS A SUPER NATURAL involved

2- My second statement has to do with cause. Its not really an explanation but its something you should look at. Why dont you go ahead and kill a random person on the street. What causes you to say no thats just wrong? I mean if you look at it youre just made up of a bunch of interacting atoms just as a carboard box is made of a bunch of interacting atoms. You can break the cardboard box without even thinking but cant do the same for a human being. What makes you think you can kill cows freely when cows are just as interactive of atoms as you are. Is it because they are below you in the food chain? You can canabalize humans cant you. What is your ultimate cause? Why are you doing what you are doing today?

Here’s my reply. For brevity, I will truncate some of the quoted passages that I already posted, which you will see marked with leading ellipses.

Hi Muhammad,

1. Energy exists as a result of different dimensions interacting with each other and among those dimensions is time itself.

Speaking as someone who has been through numerous physics classes, this appears to be pure gibberish which superficially sounds like science. Dimensions don’t “interact with each other.” They are units of measurement.

These dimensions interacting with each other = God.

What additional information do you get from calling it “God?” Even assuming that “dimensions interacting with each other” made sense as something other than a bunch of words strung together, why wouldn’t you just keep calling them dimensions? Do the units of measurement become conscious when you apply this label? I don’t get it.

…that it eventually shat out the universe means there was a particular point in its existence some specific point in its existence that shat out the universe.

You’re making a bunch of statements that are not supported by any observation. We don’t know whether it’s in some way more likely for energy to “sit on its ass” than “shit,” because we have nothing outside of this universe to compare it to. Science doesn’t currently have any definite position on whether there is some kind of metaverse, containing more energy which either sits or shits. We don’t have any statistical data. For all you know, free floating energy has no alternative but to shit universes. Or whatever you’re trying to say.

The fact that it shat out the universe in point A and not in point B means there was some sort of intelligence involved.

1. To what are you referring when you say “point B”?2. Where the heck did intelligence enter the conversation? As far as we’ve observed, intelligence only comes as the end product of a universe which exists, generates life, evolves brains, and executes consciousness as a behavior of those brains. Until you demonstrate that there is some kind of stuff that behaves like a brain outside of the universe, you’re just making stuff up.

…I would have to go back to my original statement that it could have just sat its ass out there and nothing happened but it didnt, something happened, meaning there has to be something that caused it to happen.

Why?

There are two uninhabited patches of land. On one of them, it rains. On the other, it does not rain. Does this require somebody to “intelligently” choose to make it rain in one place and not another? Must everything be uniform, all the time, unless there is divine intervention picking between two places? If so, what is your justification for this claim?

…THERE IS A SUPER NATURAL involved

I think you skipped a step that explained what “A SUPER NATURAL” is and how you know it exists.

2- My second statement has to do with cause. Its not really an explanation but its something you should look at. Why dont you go ahead and kill a random person on the street.

Why would I want to do that exactly? Austin has an excellent police force which solves murder cases with a fairly high rate of success. It may not be a guarantee that I would be caught, but I think it’s pretty likely that I would wind up sent to jail or executed myself. And even if I did wind up getting away with it, many of my friends would probably have awkward questions for me, probably even fear me. As a result, I would certainly lose contact with many people whose love and friendship I value highly.

I don’t know what reality you think you’re living in, but here in this world, usually actions have consequences. When I look at all the consequences of killing random people on the street, I can’t see how the benefits even come close to outweighing the drawbacks.

…What is your ultimate cause? Why are you doing what you are doing today?

I enjoy living free, I enjoy
friendship, and I find it fulfilling to be able to support myself and get things that I want. None of those goals are furthered by killing strangers. So I’m going to have to ask you to explain what kind of stupidity would cause me to entertain such an action.

Let me turn around and ask you the same question. I would ask you what your ultimate cause is, but I’m presuming the answer will be something like “to serve my god.”

So instead I’d like to ask: what is your god’s purpose for existing? Why does the god do the things that it does? What drives it? Why does it do whatever you think it is doing?

There has been one followup exchange, which I will post later if there’s enough interest. Needless to say, though, “Muhammad” did not respond to anything in my reply, but instead went on to talk about how miraculous it was that his namesake was capable of writing a book.

Who Created God? A number of skeptics ask this question. But God by definition is the uncreated creator of the universe, so the question Who created God? is illogical, just like To whom is the bachelor married?

This was the first paragraph in a very long email, all neatly formatted in a shiny blue font. Naturally I suspected a cut and paste job, so after ascertaining that this was simply a parrot of the Kalam Cosmological argument, I simply googled key words and found it to be a word for word transcription of this page at Christian-answers.net.

Thus I replied:

Hi,

I see you haven’t troubled yourself to come up with an original argument, but merely cut and pasted the writings of another author citing the Kalam Cosmological argument. Therefore, I will respond in kind and simply link you to a thorough refutation of this claim.

If you want to respond to this page, please email me back in your own words and we will discuss it from there.

He wrote a slightly longer answer, and my counter-response (which includes the full body of his message) is below.

your right russell i didnt write it all myself because I didnt think I had to….

Sure, I don’t blame you — no sense reinventing the wheel. That’s why i did the same thing. I bet you didn’t read the refutation yet, did you?

i know im not going to persuade you that there really is a God.

Not with weak semantic hand-waving like Kalam, you won’t. Present us with some evidence for God, and we’ll be all over it.

i can tell the devil has a deep grip on your heart

It must make your life very simple when you can dismiss any counter-arguments by saying “Well, the only reason you don’t believe me is because you’re a slave to EVIL.” It’s easier than trying to read and understand things, that’s for sure.

and i hope and pray you can see that also….what you are believing is lies. you dont need to have a college degree to see it either….

Yes. I can tell.

I believe in Jesus Christ, the Son of God and I am not ashamed at all to say that.

I don’t think you should be ashamed for saying what you believe. Now, not having the integrity to understand the arguments you’re making and back them up — THAT would make me ashamed.

The reason i believe in Jesus is because of the Bible. I believe it is true. Its proven to be true. through archelogical discoveries and by the power of the Holy Spirit. I know you cant understand that because you havent had that happen….

Okay, so wait a minute. You believe in Jesus because of the Bible… and you think that the Bible is “proven” by virtue of the holy spirit. Either that is a textbook case of circular reason (Jesus and the Holy Spirit are the same thing under trinitarianism, yes?) or you left out the step where you explain why you believe in the holy spirit.

Of course, you throw in the towel when you say I can’t understand something because I “havent had that happen.” (What does “that” refer to anyway?) Proof is proof — it is repeatable and accessible to everyone. Something that only you can understand may be real, or it may be inside your head. In any case, if you don’t think you can prove the existence of God without special pleading, then why did you bother sending us a cut and paste of Kalam?

I can guarentee you have had authority problems in your life. All athiests do. their denying an authority figure over them. its simple even a 6 year old can understand…..

Didn’t I see you in a movie once? “You’re a rogue cop, Glasser! Sure, your unconventional methods and boyish charm get results, but they have no place on this force! Turn in your badge, you’re on leave until further notice!”

And with THAT uninteresting argumentam ad hominem out of the way, I’ll sign off.

Russell

Here’s the final reply, but I didn’t find it worth responding to.

first off yes i did read your refutation. thankyou for it. my reason for emailing you is because i am concerned about your soul. Everybody has a soul whether you deny it or not. Im not a smart asshole thats trying to get you to repent…..i just question your “show” or whatever it is. If their is no God then why do you care about all this? why are you wasting your time trying to persuade people? you still must be fighting a little voice or something?

It’s no mystery why we do a show. Among other things, it’s so we can have the pleasure of getting a rise out of people like this. I’m just sad that it wasn’t on air.

I don’t mind a theist being inspired by another person’s arguments or ideas. I don’t mind a theist referencing someone else’s ideas and arguments in his own arguments. There’s nothing wrong with including a link or a quoted passage, in a correspondence, to someone else’s data or views. But if a person comes to me announcing that he wants to talk to me about his beliefs, he should at least do me the courtesy of presenting his beliefs—whether or not they are supplemented by the ideas of those who have influenced his thinking.

The author of Article X, from which the theist quotes, is not the person who contacted me to discuss her beliefs. If that author wants to hear my views about her beliefs, she is able to write to me and request my feedback. But I see no value in pretending that a long strand of copied and pasted material from her article is the view of the theist who wrote to me to dialogue about his beliefs.

If a theist writes and wants to know my response to a particular article or view that is not his own, that’s fine. But he should refrain from calling it his belief, if all he can do is parrot the argument of someone else. If he lacks sufficient understanding of the concept to be able to so much as restate it in his own terms or respond to questions without running back to the source, then he shouldn’t put it forward as his belief.

Forming our own beliefs in life is not the same as memorizing and internalizing someone else’s arguments and ideas. To label such things as our own beliefs is plagiaristic and shows a woeful lack of understanding about what constitutes forming beliefs of our own. In order to dialogue about what I believe requires I have a firm enough grasp on the belief to express it clearly, in my own terms, to others, and also to respond to questions without seeking input from any source beyond my own mind. Anything that can honestly be labeled as my belief can exist nowhere but inside my own mind. A prerequisite to holding a belief is understanding the belief. It is not possible for a person to both assert a proposition is true, and to fail to understand the proposition. When questioned about what we believe—why should we need to go and look it up? If I find myself looking up my response to a question that concerns what I claim I believe, clearly, I have a dilemma.

If someone were to ask me, for example, what I believe regarding UFO activity on our planet, I can’t imagine it would make sense to that person if I said, “give me a second to go and look up what Carl Sagan has to say about that, because I believe whatever he says.” How can I call it my belief if it (a) is not contained within my own mind, and (b) I don’t even know what it is I’m claiming I believe while I am asserting I accept it as true?

I seem to see more often than is comfortable long-winded e-mails that ultimately say, “I don’t understand it myself, but I absolutely believe it.”

A few weeks ago, I made the following requests of Mike, who has kindly put in the effort to set this up:

Allow me to post any comments I have simultaneously to the blog and to him.

Always provide a link back to the original post in his reply, so that readers can visit the source if they choose.

Include a URL to at least the main blog page, and preferably to each post, in any printed material that may be generated based on our conversations.

State in his first public comment that he intends to do this.

I would, of course, do the same.

I would also like to ask one more favor. As I’m sure you’re aware, the web in general, and the blogging environment in particular, can be a pretty chaotic place. I have control over what I say, but I don’t have any authority over the people who read and comment on our blog. We almost never moderate for content, which means that any random person can arrive at our site and say whatever they choose.

Recognizing this fact, I am sure you’ll acknowledge that the comments section can be a wasteland of bad language and indelicate remarks. I will gladly agree to have a civil dialogue with Chuck, but there is no means by which I could enforce such a request on readers. From your direction, I’m fairly positive that any additional traffic we receive will include many comments which could be interpreted as “angry” and will accuse us of being everything from terrorist sympathizers to child molesters. This is past experience speaking.

If and when such comments come, I don’t feel that they should in any way reflect negatively on Mr. Colson or his positions, and I ask that you extend the same courtesy to me. Please recognize the boundaries between posts and comments, and refrain from pulling quotes from other commenters to stand in place of what I am saying.

Naturally I mean no disrespect to the great majority of our regular commenters, who are of course almost universally courteous, witty, and attractive. I’m simply hedging against any drive-by postings that might make us atheists look bad.

I am posting this here so that you folks will understand what my expectations are. From my perspective Chuck Colson has agreed to these requests by proxy, and so if he doesn’t honor them then I will politely refer back to this post and then end the conversation.

I don’t really know what to expect in the way of future guests to this blog, but I would ask the regulars — not to hold back, but please be as friendly as you can manage with visitors who don’t share the same perspective as you.

For a background on what to expect from this discussion, I request that regular readers of the Atheist Experience blog please visit this message before getting involved in any commentary.

Hello Chuck,

Let me introduce myself. I am a software developer in Austin, where I recently acquired a Master’s Degree in Computer Engineering from UT. I am also a life long atheist, which makes me something of a rarity. The great majority of atheists I know started out religious and eventually deconverted. In my case, my parents are both physicists. My father is a staunch atheist, while my mother is somewhat more “spiritual” but still does not believe in a traditional god. I definitely take after my father in this area. Both parents come from a Jewish background as well, so I have had a variety of religious instruction including a bar mitzvah. I write for the “Atheist Experience” blog as a hobby, and I also appear regularly on a cable access TV show and an internet podcast on behalf of the Atheist Community of Austin. I am a confirmed family man, with a wonderful wife and a son who just finished kindergarten, and two stepdaughters, one teenaged and one young adult.

First of all, I want to thank you for asking me to participate in this dialogue, and for sending me a copy of The Faith. I often go out of my way to listen to and read material with which I disagree, as I find it educational to consider a variety of perspectives. The last full book I read for this purpose was Darwin’s Black Box by Michael Behe, about three years ago.

In order to avoid confusion, let me define some terms. I designate myself an “agnostic atheist,” a term that I presume you will deny has meaning, based on my reading of chapter 2. In an anecdote, you attributed an aspect of certainty to both words: atheists are certain that God doesn’t exist, and agnostics are certain that no knowledge is possible. You acknowledged this as a rhetorical “ploy,” and I agree: it leaves no word available to describe my view. I do not believe in the existence of any gods (hence I am an atheist) because I do not believe that sufficient evidence has been presented to justify one. I recognize that I do not “know” in the absolute sense whether there is a god or not (hence I am an agnostic), but remain in a default state of disbelief until such time as better support for one is provided.

The above is a summary of my use of the words, and I can support them from the dictionary if you really want to spend time nitpicking about definitions. Otherwise, if you are uncomfortable with describing me as an atheist, feel free to pick whatever word you want to apply instead. “Infidel” would suit me fine, for example.

As I read your book, one major theme to which you frequently returned was your contempt for post-modernism, which you see as the philosophical rejection of objective truth. In this case, I find myself on common ground with you. Speaking as a person with a strongly held respect for science, I have on several occasions found myself arguing with post-modernists. A certain breed of armchair philosopher loves to describe science as “just another religion,” implying that it is arbitrary and irrelevant, and thereby ridiculing the idea that reality is something that can be investigated and understood. So I heartily share your general opposition to post-modernism.

I was troubled, however, by your method of arriving at a conclusion about what is true. Let me give you a small example, from chapter 4, titled simply “Truth.” You wrote:

“The only thing the god of tolerance hates more than Christians making truth-claims is Christians proving them. Beginning with a facility in Houston, Prison Fellowship now runs residential programs, ‘spiritual boot camps,’ within prisons in locations scattered across the country. This is called the InnerChange Freedom Initiative — or IFI. We have, since the beginning, contended that these demonstrate the truth of the Gospel in transforming lives. University of Pennsylvania researchers reported that IFI graduates had an 8 percent re-incarceration rate versus 20 percent in a comparable control group (and 67 percent nationally). Prison officials were astounded.

“It was the first empirical evidence that this faith-based approach to corrections works — in other words, that the Gospel is true. And that’s when Barry Lynn of the Americans United for Separation of Church and State decided to sue. To prove our truth-claims proved an outrage that tolerance could not abide.”

In a brief endnote, you mentioned that you actually lost that case and IFI was ordered to cease and desist. However, you didn’t trouble yourself to explain why.

In fact, I had already heard about this study, but I had to go and look it up again to see if your claims were right (in an objective, factual, and decidedly not post-modern sense). What I discovered was that when you claim a re-incarceration rate of only 8 percent, you are not describing all people who took your program. Instead, you selectively defined a graduate of your program to be someone who remained with the “boot camp” until their release, and then got and held a job outside of prison. In other words, someone could go through the program, be paroled, attempt to re-enter society, and STILL not be considered in your statistics if they failed to find a job.

I sometimes say that if you take an aspirin and pray to God, then your headache will go away. But that doesn’t mean that the prayer was what cured your headache. The situation that you’ve offered is similar: if you get a job and go through spiritual boot camp, then you’ll be less likely to go to jail, leaving you free to jump to your own conclusion about which one was the cause. People who have a job and money are less likely to commit crimes — this is true whether they take your program or not.

That doesn’t mean that IFI can take credit simply for disqualifying participants without a job from the survey. It would be like writing a rule that says their graduate status is automatically revoked if they ever go back to jail. If such a rule existed, then you could claim a 0% recidivism rate among “graduates,” and this would remain true even if the program accomplished nothing constructive at all.

I’m no sociologist, but I have taken a few classes on statistical methods and data analysis in my time. One of the first things that anyone should learn about citing a study is that if you taint the set of data in advance to selectively mask underlying causes, then any results you come out with are meaningless. And in this case, when you look at the whole of the study which you claimed provided “empirical evidence that this faith-based approach to corrections works,” what you find is that among all people who enrolled in your program, the recidivism rate was actually worse than the control group.

(Here is a link to the original study. On page 5 it is revealed that “Among the total number of IFI participants, 24.3% were incarcerated compared to 20.3% of the comparison group during the two-year post-release period.”)

This is just one example of a cavalier attitude toward the facts in evidence, and it puts a very different perspective on your pursuit of “capital T Truth.” What you describe as “Truth,” on many occasions I perceive as “an unwavering certainty in situations where none is warranted.” Or to put it more succinctly, “faith.”

The scientific method is built primarily on the principles that:

There is objective truth that may be discovered through investigation, but

Human perception of that truth is always subject to errors

In other words, scie
nce embodies the principle that we should always be vigilant against the possibility that we may be wrong, and be ready to recognize mistakes even in our own deeply held opinions.

I don’t see this kind of acknowledgement of your own fallibility in your writing. Even though you see things in terms of the fallen nature of mankind, you feel sure that the omniscient creator of the universe wrote a book which contains the answers to everything, and that your own interpretation is always the right one. From where I sit, this looks as if you have granted yourself infallibility. As long as your beliefs are in tune with what you think God wants, no error is possible.

Yet being certain is not necessarily the same thing as being right. Several times throughout the book, you emphasize the role of Christians who fought for the abolition of slavery, an act that we both applaud. You also dismiss the role of Christians who fought for the preservation of slavery. You curtly acknowledge their existence in chapter 12 by saying “It’s true that some Christians have been hypocritical about slavery, condoning it for too long. The record of the church is not without blemish.”

As I do not share your inclination to defend the Bible, it’s not clear to me that this is hypocrisy at all. Far from disregarding the Bible’s advice, many devout 19th century Christians saw the Bible in itself as proof that slavery was an act sanctioned by God. For example, in 1856 Reverend Thornton Stringfellow, a Baptist minister from Culpepper County in Virginia, wrote an essay called “Scriptural View of Slavery“, which is full of passages that support his opinion, such as:

“Job himself was a great slave-holder, and, like Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, won no small portion of his claims to character with God and men from the manner in which he discharged his duty to his slaves.”

“See Lev. xxv: 44, 45, 46; ‘Thy bond-men and thy bond-maids which thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen that are round about you: of them shall ye buy bond-men and bond-maids. Moreover, of the children of the strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you, which they begat in your land. And they shall be your possession. And ye shall take them as an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit them for a possession, they shall be your bond-man forever.’ I ask any candid man, if the words of this institution could be more explicit? It is from God himself; it authorizes that people, to whom he had become king and law-giver, to purchase men and women as property; to hold them and their posterity in bondage; and to will them to their children as a possession forever; and more, it allows foreign slaveholders to settle and live among them; to breed slaves and sell them.”

“This, by the way, is a singular circumstance, that Jesus Christ should put a system of measures into operation, which have for their object the subjugation of all men to him as a law-giver–kings, legislators, and private citizens in all nations; at a time, too, when hereditary slavery existed in all; and after it had been incorporated for fifteen hundred years into the Jewish constitution, immediately given by God himself. I say, it is passing strange, that under such circumstances, Jesus should fail to prohibit its further existence, if it was his intention to abolish it.”

“If, therefore, doing to others as we would they should do to us, means precisely what loving our neighbor as ourself means, then Jesus has added no new moral principle above those in the law of Moses, to prohibit slavery, for in his law is found this principle, and slavery also.”

So you can see here that faith and conviction in the truth of the Bible were at one time used to support the continuation of slavery. I don’t think that Reverend Stringfellow’s faith was any less sincere than yours; even though I think, as you do, that he was wrong.

Please don’t assume that this way of thinking is too old-fashioned for modern, enlightened Christians. I have engaged in many conversations with very earnest Christians who, rather than explaining away passages such as those in Leviticus which clearly prescribe slavery, worked hard to justify them. They argue that “Biblical slavery” was very different from the slavery in the American South, and that it simply wasn’t such a problem for those living in ancient Israel to own slaves as long as the slaves were treated humanely. In a few extreme cases, I’ve even had Christians essentially tell me that having a job is no worse than being a slave, and it would therefore not be such a bad thing if “Biblical slavery” still existed.

Christians arguing for slavery? Is this the fault of post-modernism and relativism? Or is it simply an honest effort to reconcile a book which is “known” to contain absolute immutable truth? Assuming that your faith is incompatible with slavery, by what method should I choose the truth-value of your faith over the faith of Stringfellow? I could apply reason based on core values, of course. But if this is possible, as I think it is, then I would argue that “faith” is a useless contribution to the discussion altogether.

One of the main things that motivates my atheism — beyond the simple fact that I do not see any compelling reason to believe in God — is that I cannot regard faith as more reliable than evidence as a means to learn about truth. Sometimes I must make decisions without enough evidence to be certain. In those cases, I recognize the possibility that I may be wrong, while still choosing to believe whatever best fits the available facts; and I expect that my beliefs may change when new information is available. This is not similar to the Biblical description of “faith,” which is “being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.” (Hebrews 11:1, NIV translation) It is this sense of “being certain” despite a lack of evidence that troubles me.

The perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks had a tremendous amount of faith. You can say whatever unflattering things you want about their actions and their motives, and I’d certainly agree with you; but one thing you cannot accuse them of is a lack of faith. I see no reason to think that they did not sincerely believe their own doctrine which said that they would be honored as martyrs in the afterlife and awarded 72 virgins.

Was it a bad thing to do? Absolutely. Many innocent people were hurt and killed due to the faith of the hijackers, and that is a terrible thing for the victims and their families; it is also extremely sad for the rest of us, as people who have empathy and compassion. Yet if I were to speak reasonably to a fundamentalist Muslim, as I am speaking to you now, I do not think I would be able to persuade that Muslim that he was wrong. Why? Because he doesn’t believe that there is any such thing as truth? Of course not — it is because he has very concrete beliefs about the truth of his god, which cannot be proven on the basis of observation or reason, but which are confidently accepted on the grounds of faith.

Throughout your book, you lumped unbelievers in with both post-modernists and radical Islam as cooperative forces that you imagine are working to destroy our culture. From my perspective, this is a categorical error. On the contrary, I tend to think that what divides “us” from “them” is not which religion is claimed by the majority of citizens. It is our willingness to recognize that although people have different opinions, it is worth the effort to communicate with them and resolve our differences peacefully. War is an option, but a last resort. We even understand that other people might continue to believe things that are wrong, and yet strive for a solution that in
volves conversation rather than blowing stuff up or crashing airlines. I know you must desire this approach in some cases, because you sent me your book and asked for a dialogue, even though it is clear from your text that you believe I am your enemy.

Ultimately I reject the faith of the hijackers as insufficient grounds to claim knowledge, just as I reject yours. This leaves me free to judge their actions and yours based on the consequences, as viewed through the lens of my values and my concerns about justice. You may say that this is subjective, and perhaps it is. Unlike “the physical world,” which can be observed, values are ultimately the domain of the person who possesses them and the society in which they live. You presume that your values are the same as the values of a god who is always right. But in thousands of years of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, faith and devotion have been used to defend slavery as often as condemn it; to promote unproductive wars as often as prevent them; to suppress freedom as often as to champion it.

By no means does this imply that I think all atheists are wonderful, nor that Christians are evil. Certainly not in the same sense that you seem to believe my point of view is evil. On the contrary, from reading the historical anecdotes that you highlighted in the second half of your book, I would venture to say that we admire many of the same character traits in people, and love many of the same aspects of humanity.

In practice, though, I believe that you make many clear factual mistakes due to your insistence that belief in God and Jesus can never steer you wrong. And because I am still not impressed with the arguments for the accuracy of the Bible — which we can discuss in future correspondence, if you wish — I ultimately don’t feel that supporting your faith is worth enough to justify the extreme tolerance for error.

Thanks again for initiating this discussion, and I look forward to your reply.

An emailer named Mike, who bears the superfluously fancy title of “Consumer Engagement Manager, Internet Marketing and Social Networks,” privately emailed the following to me:

Hi Russell -

I came across your blog at http://atheistexperience.blogspot.com/ and am writing with a unique opportunity for you. Chuck Colson, former Counsel to President Richard Nixon, who converted to Christianity before spending time in prison on a Watergate-related charge, has written a new book called The Faith: What Christians Believe, Why They Believe It, and Why It Matters. Chuck is the founder of Prison Fellowship. His radio broadcast, BreakPoint, airs daily to five million listeners. In the last thirty-three years, Colson has visited more than 600 prisons in forty countries and, with the help of nearly 50,000 volunteers, has built Prison Fellowship into the world’s largest prison outreach. You can learn more information about Chuck’s new book at www.Zondervan.com/TheFaith.

The reason I am writing is that Chuck wants to have a friendly dialogue with a few atheist bloggers about his book. We’d like to invite you to be one of the bloggers.

This is a unique opportunity in that you’ll be able to dialogue directly with Chuck Colson about his book The Faith and Christianity. (Well, he has asked that the dialogue flow through me, but Chuck personally will be replying in person to all the dialogue.) Zondervan will periodically promote this dialogue on our blog, so this should generate more traffic to your blog. Also, this will be an opportunity for your blog readers to react to your dialogue with Chuck.

Let me know if you are interested? If so, I will mail you a free copy of Chuck Colson’s The Faith. We’d like to try to have this dialogue sometime in June, so we’d give you a couple of weeks to read the book and generate a few questions for Chuck. I’ll then get those questions to Chuck and his reply back to you. You’re welcome to then post the dialogue up on your blog, and respond with some counter-points or questions too if you’d like, which I’d again get to Chuck. I don’t know for sure how much back and forth Chuck will want to do, but I know he’s up for at least one round and my hunch is he’d be up for a few rounds of dialogue. An important point though is Chuck would like to keep the dialogue friendly & civil. Fair enough?

If interested, please send me a mailing address and I’ll get you a copy of Chuck’s book. Let me know if you have any questions on this. Thanks for considering this unique opportunity!

Chuck strikes me as a tad bit full of himself and the tremendous significance of this out of all other apologetics books. I went ahead and gave him my address, saying I wouldn’t mind looking it over but I don’t promise to drop everything and read it by a suitable deadline. I also notified Martin and Matt.

Mike touts that this will be swell publicity for this blog. Shrug. It is certainly publicity of a sort, but the result is that we will probably be flooded in the short term by Christian trolls.

On the other hand, eyeballs are eyeballs, and Chuck certainly has an audience. If we’re not bothered by exposing ourselves to phone-in trolls on cable access TV, it’s not necessarily terrible to have a few hundred thousand Christians hear about atheism from an atheist for a change, instead of from Chuck Colson.

I don’t doubt that if Chuck reposts our conversation, he could very well (a) whack the content with an editor stick, (b) fail to link the response at any time, and (c) cherry pick responses to prove that atheists are rude and “angry.” (Given the nature of blog comments, I’m sure he’ll be provided with ample material, as will we on the other side.) But still, it might be an entertaining exercise, and wouldn’t be the first time I’ve read apologetics in order to form a proper critique.

Probably not many of you have long enough memories for this, but one of the very first topics I ever did as a guest on the Atheist Experience TV show was about a concept called “Theomatics.” If you’re familiar with the “Bible codes” then you probably have the general gist of what it’s about. You don’t create crossword puzzles to find significant words and phrases. Instead, you have a cypher which assigns each letter to a number, and then you attempt to find significant words or phrases in the Bible that are multiples of some number that you pick.

It’s all very silly, of course, because you can pick any number that you like, and then given a long enough sequence of words, you can find seemingly significant phrases on any subject. If you’d like to verify this for yourself, you can read the short article I wrote at the time, and then find your own gematria-based phrases by running my program.

I still get email about this from time to time. Part of the reason is because I’m linked from the first page of a Google search on Theomatics, and I’m also linked from the Wikipedia page. Here is an email exchange I just had.

Gary writes:

I just reviewed your Theomatics Debunked rebuttal of Theomatics… and immediately,
it became a useless challenge.

I have known of Theomatics for over 20 years… and understand it.
After reading your rebuttal and so called “Debunking” it became
immediately apparent that you completely misunderstand the entire
premise and subject. And so much so, that I can see that your only
goal was to slam Theomatics… whether you proved anything or not.

In totem, your ‘Debunking’ was hillarious… hedging on utter stupidity!

Now, usually I don’t respond to this level of obnoxiousness at all — somebody who walks in assuming that I’m an idiot is unlikely to yield a fruitful discussion. But I was curious about what Gary might bring to the table, so I replied:

Okay, I’ll bite. What was it about my program that failed to capturethe point of Theomatics? Can you be more specific about what makes it so stupid?

Gary replied:

For one (major) of many points:

I am admitedly no expert on the subject, but I’m not brain dead. Your analogies to debunk Theomatics were clearly without merit.
All you did was show that numbers can be found in random text.
a) you completely ignore the fact that in the Bible, specific NUMBERS are established “in the text/writings” that also correlate and become significantly re-established in the numerology of both the Hebrew/Greek alphabet. That these numbers are adequately repeated throughout scripture. Theomatics reveals that these numbers written in text (IE: seven, two etc) are reinforced by the subjects, themes and within context of “MEANING” whether literal or prophetic, whether poetic or factual, whether spiritual or historic… THESE SAME NUMBERS IN TEXT are directly supported by the construction of the writings… which, across 4000 years span of two languages/cultures (Hebrew/Greek), and authored by 40 authors… the letter symbol construction of these writings in these two languages reinforce the script or TEXT level numbers and meanings. None of which was assembled in random nor is there ANY evidence in collusion between or amidst the authors to establish the onion skin-like layers of numerical significance. To go further, The phenomenon of Theomatics wasn’t even KNOWN until the mid seventies.

In this point alone, you have missed the boat in your lame attempt to make an analogy of Theomatics with your examples. In short, your examples leave out 80% of what is significant about Theomatics.

I replied:

I certainly do appreciate the feedback, but I’m not convinced thatyour claim has any bearing whatsoever on my response.

Regardless of how the significant numbers are chosen, the point of the program was to demonstrate that ANY number can yield seemingly significant results from any text. Thus is doesn’t matter whether the text attaches significant meaning to 111 or 52 or 69. By running a large enough text through a computer with some set of rules and any number you please, you can pick out thousands of phrases which translate to multiples of that number. It’s simply a matter of confirmation bias. No collaboration or special planning on the part of the authors is required.

> To go further, The phenomenon of Theomatics wasn’t even KNOWN until the mid> seventies.

Of course it wasn’t, and that’s part of the point also. Theomatics doesn’t make any predictions and it doesn’t yield any useful new knowledge. At best it can be used as a tool for identifying events in hindsight. You know what you are looking for already, and you find things that appear to confirm the significance of phrases that lookimportant.

Gary replied (all bold text from the original):

But you DO SO at the complete exclusion of the fact that the numbersare significant because they are established IN THE TEXT and writings.They are established both in language/writings and are given specificrelationships to people, times, places and subjects.Your analogies do NOTHING but prove you can produce detached numbers!You exclude that the phrases associated with these numbers are relatedIN CONTEXT of the commucation of concepts of various central theme.No. I have reviewed your site all morning… and you simply DO NOT MAKEA VIABLE CRITIQUE that holds relevence whatsoever to support “debunking.”All you achieved is to debuke yourself.

Of course it wasn’t, and that’s part of the point also. Theomaticsdoesn’t make any predictions and it doesn’t yield any useful newknowledge. At best it can be used as a tool for identifying events inhindsight. You know what you are looking for already, and you findthings that appear to confirm the significance of phrases that lookimportant.

Wrong again. But, you’ve already debunked yourself.So I will leave you to your own defunct debunkingness.

Then I replied:

But as I’ve already said, it doesn’t actually matter how the numbers are chosen. The number 111 will produce significant hits, and so will all other numbers. You claim that the number 111 is especially interesting because it is established as important by the text — although in reality, 111 is just one of thousands of numbers which could be regarded as significant depending on your interpretation.

But I don’t care how you pick your numbers. The point is that whether a number is “significant” to you or not, it will yield phrases which appear to relate to any topic you choose. It’s just that you care about the resulting phrases when the chosen number is “significant,” and you don’t care when the chosen number is not “significant.” It’s your own filter on the text that makes it meaningful or not, however you read it.

> Wrong again. But, you’ve already debunked yourself.> So I will leave you to your own defunct debunkingness.

That’s a great word you’ve invented. Although I think I would have picked something like “debunkiferation.”

Gary replied:

You have missed the entire collective point.
I don’t know how to help you see it, but I have friends who are
PHd’s that get it… and several friends who are not even Christians
see the signifiance. If you see a copy of the book I have,
Sanford University’s Statistics division studied Theomatics
for several months and produced a report that said that
the Theomatics feature in the Bible is unique. They could
not produce the same results in other writings, or even
spiitual writings. And they said the chances of it just
happening were like 1 out of several hundred billion.
If I find the online re-print of this I will send it.

I replied:

> I don’t know how to help you see it, but I have friends who are> PHd’s that get it…

It looks like you can’t. Maybe you should ask them to discuss it with me instead of you.

> If you see a copy of the book I have,> Sanford University’s Statistics division studied Theomatics> for several months and produced a report that said that> the Theomatics feature in the Bible is unique.

Since “Sanford” doesn’t appear to be the name of an actual university, I have to assume that you mean either “Stanford” or “Samford.” Samford is a Bible college in Alabama, so I bet it’s that. Imagine that: a Bible college came to the conclusion that Theomatics is correct. I’m floored by their objectivity.

> They could> not produce the same results in other writings, or even> spiitual writings. And they said the chances of it just> happening were like 1 out of several hundred billion.> If I find the online re-print of this I will send it.

Well, I produced what appears to be a similar result in just twenty minutes on my computer, so perhaps they weren’t trying all that hard. I expect you’ll continue to repeat that I missed the entire point of Theomatics, as you have in each letter so far. So far I still don’t see the relevance of your argument that some numbers are more important than others. But I suppose that’s just a factor of my dysfuntional debunktionality.

That was the last message in this exchange.

So let’s see: in the final tally I see at least two arguments from (unnamed) authority, and three things I’ll say are confusion of cause and effect (the phrases were found in the Bible after the “discovery” of theomatics, therefore they were put there deliberately by someone who knew theomatics in advance).